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Issues in Securing Electronic Transactions


The issues that confront us in relation to securing electronic transactions are :

  • Confidentiality
  • Integrity
  • Availability
  • Authenticity
  • Non-repudiability
  • Auditability


Confidentaility
Information should be protected from being read by external hackers or unauthorized internal users. It should be also safe while being transmitted on the network and make data unintelligible even if someone gets access to it. The content should be sent deciphered so that none other than the person who has the transformation algorithm can read it.

Integrity
Sometimes the message might be read and modified on its path. It should be possible to generate an alert on any modification -addition or deletion of the original content. Proper mechanisms are necessary to ensure end-to-end message content and copy authentication.

Availability
The information that is being stored or transmitted across communication networks should be available whenever required and to whatever extent as desired within pre-established time constraints. Some of the causes of unavailability of information are power outages,operational errors,network errors, application software errors,viruses and hardware problems. There are methods for implementation of counter measures to these hazards. But unfortunately they are beyond the scope of end-to-end message security for implementing e-commerce.

Authenticity
It is necessary that the information sent,should be sent to the right person for whom it is meant. Also on the other hand, when a message is received it should be possible to verify whether it has indeed been sent by the person or object claiming to be the originator. There should be enough safeguards to prevent any person or object from masquerading as some other person or object.

Non-repudiability
For e-commerce to grow and successfully thrive it is necessary to bind messages and message acknowledgements with their originators. That is after a person sends a message the sender should npt afterwards deny having sent it. Also the receiver of a particular message should not at a later date deny having received the message.

Auditability
Recording of audit data must be done in such away that all specified confidentiality and integrity requirements are met. Implementing a security solution in an E-commerce environment therefore necessitates a Risk Analysis of the business scenario. In some cases, confidentiality might be an extremely critical issue whereas in others it may only be data integrity that is of paramount importance. All possible threats should be considered and a security requirement policy drawn out for the organization based on a combination of some or all of the services listed above. 

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